Just because something's in the cloud now doesn't mean it'll always be there.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

As a radio person, there are few worse feelings.

When you realize some tape you thought you had nicely stored is actually gone.

And when I say tape, I mean the digital sound recording.

All digital files are stored on physical media, such as hard drives or what's called LTO data tape.

And anything physical can fail. So some companies and

libraries and public radio stations turn to digital archivists. I talked with one, Linda Toditch,

who leads the company Digital Bedrock. I spoke with her about the work that goes into digital

preservation. We almost had a forest story.

It was for a television series and an important one,

and the first season of it, they couldn't find it.

And so thank goodness again, they had a second copy that was okay,

and we can restore the data off.

Because a lot of this in work with people who have had data for a while

is on older storage media, it's on older drives, like firewire drives. You don't have

cables anymore. We have to become a museum with hardware. They're on old LTO tape written in

a backup system, which is proprietary. So we have to have Windows XP machines running,

you know, Windows 95 machines running, you know, so that we can use some of that older

backup software, which is obsolete that gets to the obsolescence factor to get that data off.

Why is this so hard? You know, people reminisce about the old days we had film film, you could just put it, you know, the can on a shelf and everything, and that's called store and ignore.

And with digital content, you can't do that. You have to be really aware of it.

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